Blockchain firm Hylé closes $2.6 million financing round

It's one of the rising French projects. Launched a few months ago, layer 1 blockchain Hylé has announced that it has completed a $2.6m funding round, taking its total raised to $3.4m.

The funding round was led by Framework Ventures, a historic decentralised finance (DeFi) venture capital firm. The fund's investments include Aave, Optimism and Layer 2 Swell. Cherry Crypto, Fabric Ventures, Frst Capital and Heartcore Capital also participated in the round.

Hylé is another project that originated from former Ledger employees. It was co-founded by Lancelot de Ferrière le Vayer and Sylve Chevet, who was product manager at the French unicorn for more than three years.

Specialising in zero-knowledge proofs

Hylé will operate in a decentralised way thanks to proof-of-stake consensus. Currently, the only validator is Hylé Labs, as the blockchain is still in the testing phase. It will be accessible without authorisation. There are currently 5 people working at the start-up.

"We want to help improve this technology very quickly by enabling projects to develop their zero-knowledge proofs(ZKP) solution very easily via our network," Sylve Chevet tells The Big Whale.

To achieve this, Hylé has chosen to adopt a modular structure along the lines of Celestia, separating the execution and settlement of transactions as well as data storage so as to gain in efficiency to drastically reduce the cost of verifying a ZK proof. "The cost of verification is currently the main barrier to the development of these tools," says Sylve Chevet.

The development of ZKPs is particularly eagerly awaited, notably because they enable transactions to be validated without revealing private information.

In the long term, Hylé's ambition is to become the multi-chain reference solution for verifying a transaction via a ZKP. "It will be possible, for example, to have a transaction verified from Solana to Ethereum via a ZKP solution. Our ambition is to be a kind of layer 0 or bridge for zero-knowledge proofs," says Sylve Chevet.